


Pair of Thieves

by queer_cheer



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)
Genre: One-Shot, ask memes, but one with heart, prompts, river being a badass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23123071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queer_cheer/pseuds/queer_cheer
Summary: River Song arrives on the lunar market Ganymede with a very specific mission, but she doesn't count on meeting a beautiful, adventurous stranger who isn't really a stranger at all.(In which River meets the Eighth Doctor, and realises there are some rules that must never be broken.)
Relationships: River Song/Eighth Doctor
Comments: 9
Kudos: 37





	Pair of Thieves

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! This was requested by a lovely anon on Tumblr, and I totally want to do more one-shots as writing exercises (and also because I just need more River content in my life, as if my Very Long Series isn't enough lmao), so if there's anything you want me to write about, comment or shoot me an ask on Tumblr (queer-cheer)! 
> 
> This prompt comes from a blog of writing prompts (https://imagine-the-fluff.tumblr.com/post/153105729638/prompt-list) so if you want you can pick one of these or send in your own! :)

River Song liked many things.

She liked rock ‘n roll, and she liked a good book. She liked shopping, and traveling, and coffee, and wine, and those little chocolates that popped up on pillows in hotel rooms. But most of all, she liked being right. And she was right about many things, too. 

But as she made her way through the crowded streets of Ganymede — the Moon Festival was well underway on Jupiter’s largest satellite — she was starting to realise just how wrong she’d been about one very specific and important thing: the time. It was the Moon Festival, yes, and judging by the (rather fashion-forward) wardrobes of wealthy patrons, she’d landed in the right year. She’d meant to arrive by noon, but daylight had long since faded, and a midnight sun glowed crimson overhead. 

She gave her vortex manipulator — cloaked on her wrist as an ornate pearl cuff — a solid, punishing whack.

“I set you for noon tomorrow,” she grumbled. “And you bring me to the wrong twelve o’clock!” This, she thought, is why the entire universe ought to adopt military time. 

In retaliation, it delivered a firm electric shock to her arm, and she let out a low hiss.

“Smug piece of kit,” she grumbled.

Her Doctor — the eleventh face, with the silly bowtie and floppy hair — was set to arrive about twelve hours from now, but this wasn’t meant to be a romantic excursion. Rather, she needed to enlist his help in a very, very time sensitive mission: Somewhere in the marketplace, there was an amulet worth a million credits, and somewhere else in the marketplace, there was a very rich aristocrat with a million credits to burn. But the amulet didn’t belong to the clerk selling it; it had been stolen in a raid during the Great War of Triangulum by pillagers who’d sold it for half its worth just to get it off their hands. 

It’s true owner was an elderly woman whose dying wish was to pass it along to her granddaughter on her wedding day — and River had every intention of making that happen. 

(She’d insist it wasn’t out of the goodness of her heart, because she wasn’t good and she didn’t have a heart, that she really just needed something to do. But a certain doe-eyed Doctor would surely call her bluff.) 

She was adjusting the seam of her black velvet dress when she felt a stumbling body crash into her from behind. Her purse slipped from her shoulder, and her collection of miscellania spilled out onto the cobblestone; a stick of red amnesiac lipstick, a fine-toothed sonic comb, and black nailpolish tinged with a potent paralytic. Amid it all tumbled a sonic screwdriver — she’d borrowed it from the Doctor, and by borrowed, she meant snuck it out of his coat pocket. 

She turned, ready to shout at some impertinent child for rushing carelessly through a crowded street, but instead of an acne-faced teen on a hoverboard, she found herself looking into ageless eyes, pale blue and pretty.

_Doctor._

But different. Younger. Curly dark hair, soft lips, and a jawline cut from marble, his eyes betrayed none of the hurt she knew he had coming. Only hope. This one was very young, she thought, and he would live a long, sad life. 

He was apologising like mad when River forced herself back to reality, shaking herself free of the things he could never know she knew. The Doctor — wearing his eighth face, rosey cheeks and all — had crouched down to gather the things she’d dropped.

“It’s fine,” she snatched them up and tossed them haphazardly into her bag, but she wasn’t quick enough. He caught a glimpse of the sonic, and as he straightened up, eyes locked on River’s face, his own expression shifted from one of apology to one of deep confusion. 

“Is that a sonic screwdriver?” he asked her, stunned. “Gallifreyan technology.” 

“What?” River made an attempt at a dismissive laugh. “Oh, that old thing? No! It’s an...uh, it’s a…” Lying was so very easy for her, but something about that Doctor — about this Doctor in particular — snatched the words from her lips and threw them out with the rubbish. And so she settled with something basic. “It’s just an electric cigarette. Big on Earth, circa 2020.” 

The Doctor didn’t seem convinced, but with narrowed eyes, he nodded. He seemed to be thinking very deeply; River imagined that gears in his head were turning, carrying his memories along a thing, fibre-optic wire connecting his past to his present, and his present to his future. It was all so fragile, she thought. She was standing on the lip of a timeless mountain, and he was standing with her as the ground underfoot began to crumble. 

“Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked, just as she knew he would. 

“No, certainly not,” she smiled pleasantly. “You’ve never seen me before in your life.” 

Technically, she wasn’t lying. Not yet.

“Are you quite sure?” the Doctor, ever probing, effortlessly charming. “I can’t help but feel like I know you. Are we old friends, perhaps?” 

“We are _not_ friends!” River said firmly, coldly. She’d never had such a hard time being firm and cold, but he was warm and gentle, practically radiating passion. She fancied herself a bit of a cradle-snatcher for finding him as beautiful as she did — he all but took her breath away — but aesthetics aside, she knew she had to keep her distance. Their timelines were opposing jetstreams bound for different locations; she looked forward to their occasional temporal layovers, but she knew she had to go on living in the liminal space between them, too. Some rules couldn’t ever be broken.

“Well,” he cleared his throat. The silence between them had gone on just long enough to become awkward. “I’m sorry I knocked into you. I ought to have been paying better attention,” he laughed sheepishly, flashing a set of charming white teeth. “Can I make it up to you somehow?” 

She was prepared to excuse herself from this Doctor for good, to pull herself away from him before she got caught up in his charismatic riptide and dragged head-over-heels underwater, when she spotted it: Tucked away into a merchant’s booth shrouded in darkness, with shady characters at every angle, was the amulet. 

“Actually,” she turned to him, the faintest outline of a smile on her lips. Rules be damned. “Would you mind making a scene?” 

The Doctor blinked. He didn’t seem to be sure that he’d heard her correctly. “I’m sorry?” 

“A diversion, I mean,” she took his arm and pulled him toward the side of the walkway, nodding toward the booth. “It’s a bit of a long story, and so I’m afraid I’ll have to spare you the details, but I need those men over at that tent to be very distracted for a short while.” 

“Have they hurt you?” asked the Doctor, sympathy taking the place of confusion in his stare. “Or do you fear that they might?” 

“No, no, nothing like that,” River dismissed. “Just...help a girl out, will you?” She gave him a faux pout. “You did knock all my things on the ground, you know.” 

With a defeated sigh, the Doctor nodded. “Alright. What have I got to lose?” 

So much, River thought. So very much. 

This Doctor, she knew, saw the world through rose-coloured glasses; he was enthusiastic and unhinged, with a thirst for adventure that could never be quenched. If things had been different, she’d always thought that they would’ve made a handsome pair. 

She loved her Doctor, of course, with enough chutzpah to burn worlds and outshine suns. But the problem was that in her head, they were all her Doctor. Each and every one; the ones she’d met when she was very young and they were very old, and the ones she’d met in their cosmic infancy while she was polishing away laugh lines and fretting over grey hairs. She felt her cheeks straining under the width of her smile, but was stunned to find that they were wet, too. She wiped them quietly on her sleeve and watched as the Doctor approached the merchant’s booth. Glancing back over his shoulder at River, his eyes asked silently if she was serious. With a nod of encouragement, she urged him on.

She paced toward the booth, too, waiting for her chance to spring into action.

“Excuse me, sir,” the Doctor tapped one of the men on the shoulder. A gruff, broad gent with a matted beard and a scar on his face turned around with an impatient huff. He stood up — River hadn’t realised he’d been sitting down — sizing up the Doctor and immediately dwarfing him. But the Doctor’s life had been spent in the shadow of evil things and monsters; fear wasn’t exactly his style. He smiled. 

“Hate to be a bother, but I was sort of hoping you could answer a few questions for me,” the Doctor pulled out a tablet of psychic paper, holding it up for all to see. They gathered around, intrigued. With her eye on the prize, River inched closer toward the booth, slinking inside.

“You see,” continued the Doctor. “I’m a collector of...things. Rare things. Expensive things. And I’m also quite wealthy, you see. And I’m quite looking forward to spending a great deal of credits today.” 

Impressed with his posh credentials and willingness to run himself dry, the brutes seemed to sense a real purchasing spirit within the Doctor, who to River’s knowledge hadn’t bought anything new in a century or two. The merchants nodded at each other in agreement.

“Well, you’re in the right place for that,” replied the seller, smiling in such a way that revealed black, toothless gums. “What are you looking to buy?” 

“Something pretty,” he said, unmoved. “Something old.” 

“Well, I’ve got just the thing for you,” he turned to reach for the amulet at the exact moment River grabbed it; she was halfway done tucking it into her brassiere when she felt six pairs of stunned eyes settling on her — seven, if you counted the Doctor, who was realising quickly that he’d had exactly one job and had performed it rather poorly.

The half-a-second pause felt like a lifetime, and then River barked, “Run!” 

She leapt over the counter and grabbed the Doctor’s arm, pulling him blindly away from the sextet of thugs scrambling after them.

“Did you just steal a priceless amulet!?” gasped the Doctor.

“No!” defended River. “I stole it back!” 

“You’re mad!” He called, but the smile on his face betrayed a rare and fleeting sense of freedom, an uncommon, mischievous mirth. He looked over at River as they ran, and she couldn’t help but laugh. Soon, he was laughing, too.

They raced through crowds of merchants and peddlers, pushing aside shoppers. Some were fortunate enough to step out of the way just in time, while others dropped their purchased by the armful as the duo clattered on through.

It wasn’t very hard to outrun the kind of men who had let their teeth rot out and spent their free time smoking at the pub and drinking like fish. The merchants weren’t the strong, brutal soldiers that had stolen the amulet. They were just the thugs that had bought it, and the thrill of the chase just wasn’t worth the effort. 

At the festival’s edge, where the tents and table tapered off, the terrain evened out beneath a sky full of stars. Ganymede didn’t have much by way of factors that made it livable, but the synthetic atmosphere was rather advanced; grass had been planted over filled-in craters, and from that grass — carefully maintained and nurtured — flowers had grown. Flowers needed insects, and so bugs were introduced, and River had always been partial to the humble glow worm. 

As the pair slowed their gate, River felt suddenly breathless, and it had nothing to do with their little jog. A sea of bioluminescent beetles lit up the night, and the warm faux air smelled a bit like flowers. It seemed like the night was writing her a sad little story with a beginning, a middle, and an end — in that order. 

“So, who are you, really?” asked the Doctor, drawing River back in. She looked at him, at his smile, at his lively eyes, at the beads of sweat on his brow. With a subtle ache, she realised this particular bit of their story was nearing its timely end. “You don’t seem like a run-of-the-mill thief.”

“Oh, I’m nobody,” she took her lipstick out of her purse and applied a new coat of red.

“Well, Nobody, _enchante_ ,” he held out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, River smiled and shook it.

“And you are?” 

“I’m the Doctor?” 

River smirked. “Doctor Who?” 

He laughed at the irony he thought she was oblivious to, and then promptly took a cross-legged seat on the grass. He patted the vacancy beside him, and River sat, too. 

“Why that amulet?” the Doctor asked her. “Who’d you steal it back from?”

She looked up, a bit confused. 

“Oh, yeah,” she pulled it out of her shirt and inspected it; it really wasn’t all that pretty. It held an aged ruby encased in a bed of tarnished silver, ornate carvings on its face. “It belonged to an old woman I met a few days ago; I travel a lot, you see. She survived this stupid war, but her house and most of her personal things had been taken and sold. This amulet was in her family for generations, and that old woman — she’s dying, now — wanted to give it to her granddaughter before she croaked. So I tracked it down, and the rest is history,” her smile strained and she managed a sheepish shrug. 

She felt the Doctor’s eyes on her, and she felt suddenly quite small in comparison to the vast expanse of stars he could’ve been looking at, but wasn’t. 

“That’s very good of you,” he muttered, voice thick. 

“Goodness has nothing to do with it,” she dismissed. 

“Seems like a lot to risk for a lady you met a few days ago,” he shrugged. “Why else would you do that, if not for goodness?” He paused. Met with silence, he figured he ought to fill it, and so he went on. 

“Who are you, Nobody?” the Doctor leaned in, smelling vaguely of sandalwood and patchouli incense. River’s hearts beat just a little bit out of sync. “Haven’t you got a name?” 

Wind tousled her curls. She watched the glow worms for a beat, and then she watched the stars. One shot across the night, and she thought about pointing it out to him — he did always love a good shooting star; he said they were lucky — but it seemed, for some reason, moot. Instead, she turned to cup his cheek. Thumb brushing over his prominent cheekbone, she mustered up a sad smile.

“My name is River Song.” 

“That’s a lovely name,” he replied, eyes fluttering shut. 

“Yes,” said River, and she kissed him. It wasn’t like they made it look in the films; it was more and less all at once. It was intimate. It was tender. It felt a little like foreshadowing to something big and beautiful and lovely and sad. When River pulled away, putting just enough distance between them to adjust the collar of his shirt, she sighed. “Yes, and in about thirty seconds, you’ll forget you ever heard it.” 

The Doctor’s goofy grin deflated. 

“I don’t--” 

“Amnesiac lipstick,” River stood up, straightening out her dress. “Your life, my love, will be long and difficult, with peaks and troughs, with joys that soar above the highest mountain and sorrows that burrow deep underground,” she smiled, but paired with wet eyes that properly ruined her mascara and eyeliner, it looked a bit like a grimace. “But sometimes, you’ll be content to stand still, and when you are, I’ll be back to pull you up off your arse and remind you — subconsciously, I’d think — of the night a pair of thieves ran away, and how fun and free they felt.” 

The Doctor’s eyes had drifted shut, and as a haze of chemical sleep took him over, River held him by the shoulders and laid him down on the grass. It broke her heart to leave him there, alone and vulnerable and so, so very young. But he’d be alright, she thought. He’d wake up in the morning and wonder what the hell he had to drink last night. 

And by then, River Song would be long gone.


End file.
